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lHb RESURRECTION AS INCREDIBLE 
OR INEVITABLE 



A SERMON 

BY THE 

REV. CHARLES WOOD, D.D. 



Preached in the 
CHURCH OF THE COVENANT 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



'Printed by 'Uhe Session 



EASTER SUNDAY MORNING 
APRIL 4th. 1920 



W Y 12 1925 



The Resurrection as Incredible or Inevitable 



"Wliy should it be thought a thing incredible with you that 
God should raise the deadV — Acts 26:8. 
Whom God hath raised up having loosed the pains of death 
because it was not possible he should be holden of it. — Acts 
2:24. 

On Easter Day the air we breathe is so surcharged with 
hope that it is easily possible to build lofty structures reach- 
ing seemingly into the sky. Though these edifices may have 
the appearance of houses of many mansions in the light of 
common day, they will vanish like the baseless fabric of a 
dream. 

Cautious souls will be on their guard today lest in the 
emotions excited by the return of Easter they may infer 
too much. But if there is danger in relying overconfidently 
on our hopes there may be even greater danger in trusting 
altogether to our fears. An English aviator flying with a 
companion from Paris to London was caught in a fog over 
the Channel. Keeping their course by dead reckoning, they 
saw at last an outline dead ahead. The pilot shouted back: 
"Dover Cliffs! We'll soon be there." But his companion, 
a man of more experience, whose judgment was supposedly 
of greater value than his own, answered: "Ah no; that's 
only a cloud bank. We have lost our course." The pilot, 
relying on his friend's skill, swung away to the right, and 
a few hours later they were picked up at the point of per- 
ishing in the North Sea. Hope would have landed them in 
an hour in London, but fear plunged them into the ocean. 
To mistake clouds for cliffs is as dangerous as to mistake cliffs 
for clouds. May we all be so divinely directed as to escape 
both dangers. 

' ' Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you 
that God should raise the dead?" Paul asked the question 
of King Agrippa, implying without any contradiction on the 
king's part that according to Agrippa 's way of thinking a 
resurrection of the dead was palpably incredible. There are 
intelligent persons today who share the king's conviction. 
To them a resurrection is flatly inconceivable because they 
believe that an endless life is impossible. Endlessness is a 
meaningless term as applied to any form of existence of 
which we know anything. They think. We talk freely of 
everlasting hills, of imperishable boulders, but it is a com- 
monplace of the schools that the hills are corroding and 
will at last slip into the valleys; and the boulders, however 
gigantic, are doomed to turn to dust. 



But though the mountains and the rocks perish, the atoms 
of which they a^e composed do not. The persistence of the 
atom perplexes the oldtime materialist who is satisfied to 
think of matter as so elemental as to require no explanation. 
To the new knowledge, whatever may be the philosophy of 
its possessor, matter may be only a form of electricity, like 
the light in the mazda lamp and the heat in the radiator 
and the motive energy of the trolley car. That such an 
energy, capable of playing so many roles and tricks, is im- 
perishable, is not incredible. So far is it from it that the 
indestructibility of matter is the A. B. C. of the modern 
scientific primer. 

Immortality is, of course, a different thing from imper- 
ishability. Conscious life as we know it exists only when the 
material substance called the brain is intact. Though the, 
brain is so small that it suggests a folded handkerchief shut 
into an oblong box, hardly large enough to hold the vol- 
uminous silk handkerchief of our grandfathers, man's whole 
destiny may be hidden in its convolutions, — so some are bold 
enough to assert. "The time was, when the brains were 
out, the man would die," Shakespeare says disparagingly 
of a supposed ghost. But long before that time, to all in- 
tents and purposes, the man may be actually dead. A blow 
from a falling beam causes consciousness to be interrupted 
and suspended. The intercommunicating connections between 
memory, perception and speech are broken. A horseman 
comes riding down the street. An acquaintance on the cor- 
ner says, "There goes the greatest living psychological 
scholar." His horse stumbles, he is thrown from the saddle, 
and when taken up he mumbles a few disjointed sentences. 
A minute clot of blood may absorb into itself the scientific 
lore that would fill a library. 

"The disintegration of the brain must be the complete 
annihilation of consciousness and the extinguishing of all 
hope of the survival of personality," the materialists assert. 
This troubled men long ago, of the highest intellectual pene- 
tration. Plato and Socrates discussed it. They wondered 
whether the relation of the soul to the body is that of music 
to the harp or of the harper to the harp. When you destroy 
the harp, you have destroyed its music forever. But you 
have not necessarily interfered with the harper. He may 
be able to find another instrument and to make music on it, 
sweeter than before. The brain is the instrument with which 
man thinks, but it is not the thinker. Man is the harper and 
not the music of the harp. The brain may be only the medium 
by which thought is transmitted as the wire is the medium 
which transmits your telegram. Destroy the wire, and your 
thought may still be transmitted by wireless. It is no longer 



possible to believe that the brain is an organ that secretes 
thought "as the liver secretes bile," or the discussion would 
be ended in favor of the negative. 

But our psychologists consider it probable that the brain 
is the product of thought. That it is shaped and fashioned 
by an Invisible Tenant, as a house might be by some invis- 
ible occupant, like the old Duke of Portland who wished not 
to be seen even by his servants, and whose presence was 
detected only by changes he had made in the furniture of 
the rooms through which he had passed. 

"Life, like a dome of many colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
'Till death shatters it in fragments." 

Death may break down walls and let the full flood of 
light in upon the Occupant under the dome, who will then 
see even as also he is seen. Man is not body or brain. Man 
is mind — soul. 

But permanency, persistency, continuity of atoms and 
energy, do not necessarily imply identity of any kind. Fire 
may not destroy material substances when your house burns 
down; it may only transform them so completely that while 
they still exist as gases, the house has been annihilated. 
Death may not destroy the atoms of which our bodies are 
composed, but it may transform and decompose them, and 
they may recompose merely as an influence enriching the 
world like other gaslike substances, though personality is 
annihilated. The survival of consciousness, of individuality, 
in possession of memory, by which a man recognizes himself 
as the individual who passed through earthly experiences, 
is the gist of the matter. 

This is not only not incredible ; it is made probable by 
hints and suggestions even in those evidences of mortality, 
as we are accustomed to call them, that impress the soul 
with a sense of the inadequacy, the futility, the worthless- 
ness of life. Shutting up man to threescore and ten years, 
he becomes the one and only instance of which we know 
anything in the universe, of a misfit. We find plenty of 
round pegs in square holes, and square pegs in round holes, 
in politics, in the professions, in art and in commerce, but 
we never find anything of the kind in nature. 

Every creature below man is perfect — in possession of all 
it's powers and possibilities almost from the hour of birth. 
There are no wants that are unmet, there are no longings 
that are unsatisfied. But between man's powers and possi- 
bilities there is such an absurd lack of adaptation if Death 



writes " Finis" to the volume, that it becomes incredible. 

They launched a superdreadnought awhile ago at New- 
port News, said to be the largest ever built in a bay that 
lacks but little of being land-locked. In a few months this 
gigantic structure was fitted with engines of 40,000 horse- 
power, more or less, with bunkers capable of carrying a 
supply of coal sufficient for weeks or months and a cold 
storage plant adequate for the food supply of a regiment. 
What if the outlet to the sea were not only almost but alto- 
gether closed? Is it credible that an intellect capable of de- 
signing, constructing and controlling such a ship could make 
the colossal error of building it for a half hour 's run in either 
direction f 

"What a piece of work is man; how noble in reason, how 
infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and 
admirable ! In action, how like an angel ! In apprehen- 
sion, how like a god!" Was this marvel built for a land- 
locked sea — for a voyage of a few hours or days? Man has 
forty faculties, it is said, that are never developed on earth. 
A thousand years might be given to each. Tennyson wanted 
an aeon for music, another for painting, another for science, 
and many more for poetry. 

Man has plans that cannot be executed, aspirations that 
are never satisfied, affections that are never gratified. Will 
He who has the intellect to create such a creature put him 
to permanent intellectual, moral and spiritual confusion? 
"I will not believe," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "that it is 
given to man to have thoughts nobler or loftier than the 
real truth of things." "A belief in immortality is the out- 
come of all nature's processes and methods." "All I have 
hoped or willed or dreamed of good shall exist, not its sem- 
blance but itself. " Is it credible that Peter, Paul, Augustin, 
Luther, Newton, Knox, Wesley, Washington, Lincoln, Brooks 
and Moody, and those who helped to make this church what 
it is and may yet be — disembarked after life's brief voyage 
on the shores of nothingness? Is it not infinitely more 
credible that they met their Pilot face to face when they 
had crossed the bar ready to guide them in safety over the 
ocean of eternity into their desired haven? 

All the paths by which we approach this stupendous sub- 
ject, that in personal importance makes the turmoil of the 
street and the battlefield and all struggles for supremacy 
in the market-place and the Council Chamber seem like the 
games and sports of the nursery over which adults smile, 
comparing them with what they call the realities of life — 
run up to God. "Why should it be thought a thing incred- 
ible with you" — that matter and force should persist that 
consciousness should continue? These would have been in- 



teresting questions to Paul, as interesting as to Plato. But 
Paul goes straight to the heart of the matter : ' ' Why should 
it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should 
raise the dead?" 

"I believe in the immortality of the soul as a supreme 
act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work," says 
Professor Piske. So reasonable are all God's works that 
no reliance on them is ever betrayed. Whoever puts his 
foot on the "altar stairs that slope through darkness up to 
God" will find that, if there are a few steps lying in the 
gloom, the light soon begins to steal downward upon them. 
Designing men have built stairways, broad and smooth and 
seemingly solid, upon which many an Amy Robsart, hurry- 
ing at the call of love, has plunged into the bottomless 
abyss. But the steps God has cut in the solid rock of Reason, 
Conscience and the Nature of Things will lead all who hasten 
at his call into unshaken truth and unending life. 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust, 
Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die, 
And Thou hast made him, Thou art just." 

Mendelief, the famous chemist, forming a table of ele- 
ments, saw that his list was incomplete, needing three to 
perfect it. "I believe," he said, "these will yet be found 
and that they will have certain properties," which he speci- 
fied. One was discovered in Scandinavia, another in the 
Pyrennes, and the last in the mines of Germany. Does God 
care more for completed chemical tables than for completed 
humanity? "Why should it be thought a thing incredible 
with you" that the three elements lacking to man's com- 
pleteness — Holiness, Happiness and Eternal Life — should all 
be found as God has promised — in Christ ? Of this God hath 
given assurance in that He hath raised Him from the dead. 
In Him are fulfilled all humanities, hopes and anticipations. 
"Ye are complete in Him." To all who know that He who 
was dead is alive — in the world and in the church and in 
the receptive soul — their resurrection is as inevitable as His. 

While the thought of God made the resurrection of the 
dead not incredible but probable, it was the thought of Christ 
that made the resurrection inevitable. It was not possible 
that a life such as his should be held down in the grave except 
for an interval of a few days. 

Christ is still for all who know him as Paul did, even 
though in an incomparably inferior degree, the assurance 
of immortality. The background of probability and possi- 
bility created by reason, investigation and inference are only 



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a reflecting surface against which we may "see the Christ 
stand." Such a surface may serve also as a sounding- board 
echoing across the centuries the voice whose clear tones ring 
with unspeakable hope in our ears today, "I am he that 
liveth and was dead and behold I am alive forever more." 

He who speaks from the other side of the grave is the Christ 
John saw in the city whose, gates are pearl and whose streets 
are gold ; the Christ who spoke seven times from the cross 
and was carried from Calvary by Joseph of Arimathea and 
his helpers and laid lovingly away in the sepulchre hewn 
out of the rock in Joseph's garden; the Christ whose par- 
ables, precepts and example have so often stimulated us and 
shamed us; the Christ who comforted his disciples and 
through them us, "Let not your hearts be troubled." As 
we listen to his voice we hear as an undertone the beat of 
wings as our fears like foul birds take their swift flight out 
of our hearts; and we see the glowing faces of majestic hopes 
as they come marching triumphantly into the places made 
vacant. "As Jesus died" so shall we descend into the dark- 
ness of the grave; but we shall not stay there long. "As 
Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in 
Jesus will God bring with him." We shall rise as Jesus 
rose to. share his life in eternity. 

Let this and every Easter Day be bright with flowers and 
songs, and jubilant with praise; but brighter and more 
glorious still with glad communion with the ever-living Christ 
who gives us with himself that life which cannot be holden 
of death and the assurance of an eternity in which we shall 
have time to ripen all the fruit whose seed faith has sown, 
and to become like him whose hand has thrown open the 
gates of new life to all who have joined their destiny with his. I 

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